Month: April 2012

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ACW Episode 160 – Don’t Open that Door!

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I drew this comic on Saturday. I spent all day Sunday working on a commission for a client. I finished this morning at 4AM. My house is a disaster. My office looks like someone vomited computer graphics magazines all over the place. I have email coming out the wazoo because my inbox can no longer contain it. And then there’s the actual physical mail which, combined with the unwashed laundry, is probably going to topple on me and kill me the moment I open the office door to resume the rest of my life.

Oh well! I’m taking a day just to sleep because I’ve been up 24 hours straight. I’ll deal with all that stuff when I wake up. Sometime on Tuesday, I think.

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Current Work-In-Progress by Helen E. H. Madden
Photoshop, 30 April 2012

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Flashback Friday – This is how I feel right now

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“Cynical Woman (with Pookie)” by Helen E. H. Madden, Sharpie pen on sketch paper, July 28, 1993

Long before Cynical Woman became me with horns, I drew her like this. And I think when I’m older, this is exactly how I’m going to look, so consider this a prescient self-portrait. The bug in the picture, Pookie, is a Madagascar hissing cockroach, a nod to the original Cynical Woman, Joelle.  Joelle studied entomology and wrote her master’s thesis on cockroaches. I remember sitting through her presentation. I didn’t understand any of what she said, but she did mention the word “ootheca” an awful lot.

Anyway, sorry for posting this late today. I’ve been busting ass on my current commission, a book cover for a publisher I work with.  I’ve been posting screen shots of the work-in-progress on Twitter and on Facebook, so if you follow me on either of those, you may have seen what I’ve been slaving over the last couple weeks.  (If you don’t follow me on either Twitter or Facebook, why not?! I’m a perfectly nice social media person, and I haven’t bitten anyone on Twitter in days, and the guy on Facebook that I did bite did NOT contract rabies, contrary to popular belief. He was already rabid to begin with.)

But I’ve been working very hard on this digital painting and staying up way too late too many nights and today it really caught up with me. After the Hubster left to take the girls to school, I went back to bed and had nightmares for the next few hours about Hubster switching out our phone for a complicated media center remote that I couldn’t operate to save my life (don’t laugh, he does this to me in real life all the damned time!) and it was very important that I call 911 because an undead Anne Romney might or might not have invaded our home and I was not putting up with that. 

Needless to say I woke up in a cold sweat and all the coffee in the world cannot help me feel normal and fully functional today. Oh well. Back to the digital painting.

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Work-In-Progress by Helen E. H. Madden, Photoshop, 26 April, 2012

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ACW 159 – Yay! Camping!

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Oh yeah, this really did happen. Weekend before this, I took Princess’ Brownie troop camping. And do you want to talk about whining and fighting and complaining! I made bacon and eggs with the girls to feed everybody Saturday morning and all those girls wanted was cold cereal! And they were the ones who voted for bacon and eggs in the first place!!  Heathens!

So the Brownies were driving me nuts, when out of the blue, Pixie shows up with her Daisy troop to tell me she lit a real fire!!!!!!  YES!! Just what every mother wants to hear her 5–year-old say!  Fortunately, I knew this was one of the scheduled activities for the girls, and I knew the woman running that class, so I only had a minor heart attack before I recalled that yes, it was in fact okay for my youngest child to light a fire in this particular instance.

Anyway, most of my Girl Scout obligations have been met for the year.  I’ve got a few meetings to attend, a few training classes to take, and a picnic to help with, but that’s about it. Summer is almost here, and with it comes blessed relief from the non-stop Girl Scout activity I’ve been doing since December.  My family and I will be attending a few Girl Scout events this summer, including Rock the Mall in DC and Thrill Builders at Busch Gardens, but I’m only responsible for getting the four of us there for those events, and no one else!

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Flashback Friday! Hello Natasha!!

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I’m not sure I can really explain the above drawing. This was done while I was in college, maybe while I was in grad school.  The three characters in this piece were all friends of mine, especially “Natasha,” who’s real name is Joelle. Joelle originally invented the name Cynical Woman, although at the time that name did not refer to moi. Cynical Woman was just that inner voice Joelle claimed she always heard when things were going just a little too right.  You know, everything would be all hunky dorey, and then Cynical Woman would raise her ugly head—!! (Insert scary alien-bursting-out-of-your-chest sound effect here…)

So anyway, the above drawing was a very inner joke, so inner that even I can’t remember it. I can only remember sitting and laughing over it with Joelle as we waited for Cynical Woman to rise up and smack us in the face with something else gone wrong. A lot of things went wrong back then, but somehow we survived.

Or did we?!!

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Published! Hanuman’s Gift by Helen E. H. Madden

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For those of you who are fans of steampunk, horror, evil rabid zombie monkeys, or all three, my story “Hanuman’s Gift” is now available for sale through Amazon, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and Smashwords. It is for sale for 99 cents at each venue, so don’t hesitate to grab your favorite format and load it into the e-reader of your choice!

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Deep in the Archives, Augustus Whitby toils through his duties in the , dreaming up romantic stories far more plausible than the supposed “investigations” of the field agents. A story from Agent Harrison Thorne and an unassuming artifact from his recent case, however, proves much to Whitby’s chagrin that there are some truths that are far stranger than fiction.

Tales from the Archives are short stories set in the world of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences. They explore events mentioned in the novels, characters seen and unseen and may include novel teasers of things to come.

The Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences is the delightful creation of Philippa Ballentine and Tee Morris.  You can find the other stories in the Tales from the Archives collection here, including stories by Nathan Lowell, Phil Rossi, P. C. Haring, Starla Hutchon and other fantastic authors.  And be sure to get a copy of Phoenix Rising, the first novel in the MOPO series by Pip and Tee!

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Rats! Episode 89 – Oh the Weather Outside is Frightful

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And we’re back from camping with the Girl Scouts! I gotta tell ya, today’s comic is a pretty accurate reflection of the camping trip I went on this weekend, only in reverse. We were freezing our butts off in our tents Friday night, and then sweltering and swatting away the mosquitoes on Saturday night. The turn-around in temperature definitely reminded me of dear old Blacksburg.

The fun thing about the weather in Blacksburg was that is was always awful. At least it was if you had to wear a uniform that was 50% wool, 50% polyester. When it was cold, the thin fabric of the uniform did damned little to protect you from the freezing wind. When it was hot, the wool made you sweat like a pig. And when it rained, you smelled like a wet sheep. Yes, the weather was always awful when I was a cadet.

But today it’s very warm and balmy and I’ve been traipsing around in my favorite floor length skirt and my favorite t-shirt (the one with the time machine, the mummy, and the killer robot). It’s nice. And because it’s Virginia, it won’t last. I expect summer to arrive in the next five minutes. Therefore I’m headed out of the office now to go find some popsicles. Enjoy today’s webcomic.

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No webcomic today! Instead, I sing you the song of my people!

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I spent all weekend camping with the Girl Scouts, and spent all today trying to recover. So no webcomic. Instead, I sing you the traditional song of my people!  Sung to the tune of “Camptown Ladies.”

The house is a wreck and I don’t care!

Doo-dah! Doo-dah!

Gonna dance around in my underwear!

Oh de-doo-dah-day!

I clean the place last night!

And the kids destroyed it today!

So the house is a wreck and I don’t care!

Oh de-doo-dah-day!

 

Thank you. There will be comics, or artwork, or feverish scribblings, sometime later this week.

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ACW Episode 158 – Move It Mama!

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We’re running a little late today. Sorry! The kids have spring break, so my schedule is a little out of whack.

Anyway, it’s been a while since I’ve done a “Move It Mama! Monday” post, and thought I’m no longer writing those as a regular feature here, I did recently come across something fitness-wise that would be perfect for that topic.  Last week I bought a Wii jOG. The jOG is a little device that clips to the waist and counts steps like an ordinary step counter would, but this one hooks into the Wii-mote and the nunchuk as well. The idea is that you have to keep moving (I jog in place) in order to power the nunchuk, so if you’re playing an RPG that requires you to use the nunchuk to move your character around on screen, this thing is IDEAL!

I’ve been playing Rune Factory: Frontier for ages, and I love it. It’s a very lengthy game that involves farming, dungeon crawling, character interaction (my character has to woo and marry one of the village girls), etc. There’s a pretty interesting story line, and so I enjoy playing it. But I could never find the time to just sit on the couch and play, so the game has just sort of been languishing on my bookshelf.  Now that I have the Wii jOG, though, I have an excuse to play video games. I’m not just killing time, I’m exercising!

This gets back to what I love about Wii Fitness games, which is that they are games, and the good ones don’t just run you through the standard exercises, they also entertain.  The Wii jOG transforms just about any RPG into an exercise game, ala Walk It Out (another favorite of mine). Unlike Walk It Out, though, the Wii jOG and Rune Factory now give me a story to explore as well as a landscape to run around in. I’m loving it!

The only downside is that the company that made the Wii jOG went out of business last year. I don’t know what the problem was, because the product is terrific, but they’re no longer around. However, you can still find the Wii jOG for sale on Amazon.com for a very reasonable (i.e. liquidation) price. I got mine for $5, and that included the shipping.  And another company has come out with the UMove, which combines both the pedometer and the nunchuk into one device. The cost is more (this company hasn’t gone out of business yet), but the idea is the same and I’d recommend giving it a try.

So that’s my fitness update, which I know you’ve all be longing for all these months.  On a few last notes, I just wanted to let Rebecca know her husband did exactly what she asked him to do at the InterventionCon meet up on Saturday, and he also made my day by telling me how much he enjoyed the webcomic. Moments like that are gold to a webcomicker. And to a writer. And to a podcaster. And to anybody who produces creative content for the masses. Seriously, we live for feedback.  And cheese. Cheese is very important. But complements and feedback are even better

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Rats! Episode 88 – Rank Hath Its Privileges

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When I was a cadet, it used to be that only a couple of seniors had to show up to formation at any given time –  usually whoever was selected to run the company during formation that and anyone else awake and hungry enough to bother marching over the Shultz dining hall.  But that changed my senior year.

My senior year, EVERY cadet had to show up to formation unless they had a good excuse (a signed good excuse) not to (see last week’s Rats! for more on that topic).  Seniors, however, now had the privilege of leaving their ties untucked from their shirts. Why the heck that even mattered to anyone is beyond me.

I should point out when this particular comic strip was drawn, a second student newspaper started up at Virginia Tech, and yours truly was invited to submit Rats! for publication there. I got a phone from the editor and everything, and let me tell you, I was thrilled at the chance to publish in TWO newspapers.  The strip above was the one and only strip I sent them, however, because they never printed it and when I stopped by their offices to ask them what had happened, I got told that Rats! was not wanted for their paper after all.

I don’t recall the name of that newspaper, and I don’t know if they’re even still around.  If they aren’t, then all I can say is, “GOOD! You didn’t deserve to survive after turning down my masterpiece!”

Not that I’m bitter.